And so it is that Joey O’Brien and Chris Mulhern delivered unto the people this week another blessing, in the form of a video for erstwhile collaborationists Alien Workshop and Thrasher, resounding with authority and some pomp. There can be no doubt about the Philadelphia-scene journeyman’s noseblunts, no second guessing his masteries of the frontside 5-0 backside 180 out or the 180 switch k-grind. With the ringing song it could credibly slot into the final section of a full-length vid of your choosing; has the time come for another Alien Workshop feature? Have nearly 15 years truly passed since the last go-round or is a new carbon rod required to measure the company’s current iteration? Do you remember ‘Bunker Down’?
A whiff of finality and persistent question marks also wafted through Philadelphia’s Municipal Plaza this week as stretches of chain-link fence materialized across a swatch of the tiles, an ominous sign for Joey O’Brien, the rest of the Philly heads and all others who remember similar portents popping up ahead of the overhaul and later plowing under of Love Park, and before that City Hall’s plaza. The nigh-bottomless well of online speculatories is a-flow and various artists’ renderings have been digitally bandied about, but for now all that seems clear is the reminder that skateboarders are at best unpaying tenants and squatters in these spaces — disused and oftentimes overtly avoided tho they may be.
Whether shock troops of gentrification or community builders who carve out an accepted niche, the colonization of a plaza-type spot brings with it a familiar rhythm, patterns of movement and use and behaviours that can over time lull a body into a sense of propriety, or earned localism that sometimes can seem to extend beyond the skateboarding sphere. That is, until the fences go up and the excavators begin to crawl, the C-block torn out, the onramp-adjacent bricking torn asunder and transformed into valuable keepsakes that can be packed and shipped for internet electronic commerce.
Can it be different? Incredibly, an apparent ‘yeah’ emanates this week from one of the most costliest real estate markets in the U.S., New York City, where 5Boro impresario turned municipal fixer Steve Rodriguez announced this week that the legendary Brooklyn Banks would soon begin reopening — not just a go to skate, but refurbished, including the incredible prospect of the small banks’ return. An alliance of civic workers, local skaters, residents, and Tony Hawk’s Skatepark Project seem over the course of the past decade-plus to have successfully argued the case that skaters have and should continue to hold some stake in the overpass-shadowed nook of the city, which plenty had given up for dead years ago. It is a rare and savoursome piece of good news after a stretch that felt like a lot of losses have piled up, and a signal victory for the idea that skating’s cultivation of these places can amount to some type of real world equity building, at least in some cases.
If the Brooklyn Banks can be safely slotted into skateboarding’s ‘win column,’ where does that leave the cosmic scorecard, following the preservations of Southbank and Stalin Plaza, and the demolishments of the Philly plazas and Venice pit? Given EMB’s recent renaissance, should it be taken out of the L column? Could DIY spot builders assert a form of squatter’s rights under adverse possession law to ward off encroachsome bulldozers and warbling dump trucks, laden with bad vibes? If possession is nine-tenths of the law how come there aren’t more residential deeds handed over to hardworking poltergeists?
The great grit pendulum creaked further toward the Jersey industrial swamps this week, as Mark Suciu, he of the coffee cup and the dog-eared classic, was spotted on IG skating shirtless in a tropical ditch wearing camo pants. The digital video footage was notable, as even cynics no longer can cast such moves as so much Thrasher-pandering given Mark Suciu in 2022 is at last a SOTY laureate, suggesting something bigger is going on here. Do we head into this bold and burblesome summer of 2022, knowed to some as the dos-oh-deus-deus, with Mark Suciu a convert to the camo pants set? Only the mountains know, and some secrets they hold deep in their chilly, immobile embrace, like the legend of Shock G’s gold.
There can be little argument that this current epoch ranks as a kind of camouflage golden age. Freely available and often correctly spelled, the Rothco-or-white-labeled-equivalent camouflage cargo is at once both a rank-and-file staple a la Dickies and Levis, and a reliably bankable premium product, regularly surfacing via collabo activities including but not limited to the likes of Huf, RealTree, MossyOak and Vans. Supreme has developed its own realistic camo prints, and Palace too.
The path of ‘the culture’ toward this place of diverse and varied camo patterns n’ prints has been a long and winding one since Matt Hensley podiumed the cargo short varietal in the late 1980s. Despite making appearances across the Brooklyn Banks, EMB, Love Park and Lockwood over the course of the 1990s, the camo pant frequently was sidelined at various points in favour of designer jeans, swishies, cords, and on certain feverish after-hours road trip stops, nothing at all. The road has also been potholed with wrongheaded choices, most notoriously Stephen Lawyer’s day-glo mash-ups that looked like something vomited up by a blotter-addled army surplus store.
All of these different things lead us to the unlikely scene of Josh Kalis, longtime endorser of DGK’s enlarged woodland print and one whose camo bonafides have been the subject of little question since at least ‘Time Code,’ preemptively asking his Instagram following this month to absolve him of what, in 2022, may nevertheless remain a camo faux pas to a decades-deep camo classicist. Donning a snow camo jacket, designed to help soldiers launch surprise attacks in frozen tundra environments, with traditional woodland printed pants, best suited to temperate deciduous forest combat or stylish hiking, Josh Kalis acknowledged the unconventional combo in the IG caption: “and yea.. I have woodland Camo pants and white urban Camo jacket on. Who cares.” The apparent transgression cannot outweigh the camouflage cred that Josh Kalis has banked since being among the few to successfully pull off snow camo shorts in the 1990s, though the textual shrug belies his (accurate) view that such a duo wouldn’t have flown back then.
Was Josh Kalis, seemingly throwing together whatever was around to turn wrenches on his sports cars, in fact quietly testing the waters for a late-career bucking of long-held camo norms? Who’s gonna be the first to skate in ghillie pants? Has Stephen Lawyer, bored with pushing the dimensions and possibilities of camo combos, moved on to fashion prints and cartoon dinosaur scenes?
Jerry Hsu – ‘Boys of Summer’
The heartwarming results possible – feeble grind, smith grind – when beloved pros oblige requests to ‘just see you skate’
Nick Boserio – ‘No Cash Value’
2015’s reigning lord of hairball, where you wouldn’t be surprised if he loosened his trucks before the penultimate escalator plunge
Hats off to Chrome Ball Incident for its exhaustive (yet apparently truncated) interview-by-mail with jailed switchstance barbarian, stunt cycler and street preacher Lennie Kirk, which nearly met 2015’s quotables quota on its own and expands upon all the old stories, nearly all of which seem to be true and then some:
“Many times with Jesus’ guidance, Him, I and my girl, Ez, took the bike to 177mph at night on the 101 freeway. All out throttle to the max. Alone, I topped the bike out at 184mph, wide open for more than 10 miles. Just me and God. It’s a surreal spiritual experience. God’s glory in it all. Other drivers seeing a bike fly by them at 184mph in the night! It’s deeply personal, eternal and unique. A oneness with God, my girl and my bike… flowing and free, not worried about cops.”
The print media struggle in 2015 means taking risks to stand out. Transworld, its revival already well underway, rolled further dice by essentially re-running The Skateboard Mag’s most-recent cover on page 56-57 of its Jan. 2016 issue.
Also flexing on print media this year was Quartersnacks, one of the few (if only) internet web pages with not only the nerve to make a book but the well of stories, hoarded text messagement, pic of folks skating castoff TVs and depth of collective character to pull it off in spades – buy it here.
Are ‘au natural’ street plazas going the way of the proverbial buffalo as city councils approve expensively designed, corporate-sponsored alternatives to be tucked safely away from the gentle arts of commerce and civic life? Was Bobby Worrest, by soaking his first and best of three 2014 video parts exclusively in DC’s notoriously hard-to-skate Pulaski plaza, making a point to us all about using every part of such diminishing urban resources, from its highly regarded dish to the bitty handrails? Was he really high-tailing it from the cops at 00:25? Such questions are unanswerable at best and at worst open up the possibility of galactic damnation, which would make it incrementally more difficult to draw continued pleasure from the way Bobby Worrest threads his way through the spot, sometimes seeming to chart his route on the fly (like the line with the frontside 180 nosegrind revert), getting chummy with ledges and with no wack tricks. His lines in this part are varied and deep with hard tricks (switch frontside bluntslide, switch kickflip backside tailslide, switch kickflip frontside noseslide, etc etc), sparing little notice for traffic of the human or auto persuasion. Whether it was the U.S. government shutdown, Zero’s molar-rattling ‘Cold War’ vid, salvation via Nike from the dregs of shoe sponsorlessness or just ‘his people’ (as pictured following the final switch flip), something kindled a fire beneath Bobby Worrest’s sneakers this past year, and the adoring populace can only hope it continues to bubble, blister and blacken his foot-flesh well into 2015.
Big Punisher the rap singer famously weighed 700 pounds at the time of his untimely passing several centuries ago. This achievement, unequaled by rappers of his time or since then, made true the statement that this onetime government-named Christopher Rios had more heart than would-be rivals in the game because it later was revealed that his heart was three times the size of a normal human’s, a Grinch-like feat that alongside his body of work enshrined eternally Big Punisher’s non-player status.
Would Transworld Skateboarding have enjoyed similar canonization had the Tracker-birthed publication evaporated at the height of its Sears-catalogue engorgement? The future of the past unoccurred is but a shadow out of time and a colour out of space. However, a confluence of worldwide economic tightenings, growths within internet page browsing, and the collective lines of ethernet speed snorted by Youtube uploaders, hard/softgood manufacturers and Pro Spotlight-eligible pros themselves seems over the past decade to have exacted a fleshy toll upon the World’s Number One Skateboard Magazine*.
TWS has hovered slightly above the 100-page mark in recent months, roughly same for The Skateboard Mag. Days when colourful and pro-endorsed hair gels and the dairy industry trade group balled for position alongside Baker boards and decades-old urethane concerns seem to have faded, with some choosing instead to pursue unique clicks and views on Quartersnacks.com and the Slap message-boards, while a new vanguard of more-virtual board outfits slings merchandise straight off white-labeled web blog platforms. It is a departure from the heady days of 2003, when TWS’ 20th anniversary issue boasted four different covers enveloping 408 pages; ads for Seek, Artafact, Germ and Fuze; two separate spreads featuring Toan Nguyen and one with Anthony Pappalardo backside tailsliding a hubba.
In recent weeks, Palace made several ripples for having an ad in TWS at all — which when you think about it is an uneasy look, re: one of the better-selling (and better-conceived) board companies of the day sort of deigning to show up at the party. Elsewhere, magazine ads taken out by Supreme and Fucking Awesome similarly have been seen as a novelty. While the remaining big three mags experiment with placing print content online in various forms, recent jumps from print to digital for Skateboarder and Slap ominously withered on the vine.
TWS and TSM and Thrasher could move similarly and sometimes do; witness Transworld’s own recent scoop, catching up with fresh-out messageboard darling Jereme Rogers. You’d imagine though that they’re somewhat constrained with the machinations of producing an actual physical product every four weeks, the expenses that go alongside supporting staff photographers, designers, writers and ad-sales officials. It has rightly been said that print magazines’ role these days includes some gatekeeping, and that a photo or interview in a magazine means more and lingers longer in the collective consciousness, and they have maintained as the de-facto locales for hosting and posting serious ‘internet’ video parts. But one worries how long this persists when the every-four-years generational shift skews more and more toward informing itself via mobile phones and whatever vaporous, cloud-infused technology may lurk just over these brave and binary horizons, for instance a floating monocle that allows the wearer to surf a web and look at his or her phone through the other/opposite eye.
Thrasher remains relatively fat and seems kind of insulated to all of this, having harnessed its SOTY award as a magnet for exclusive campaigner video parts, shifting KOTR toward a WWW serial and generally tethering its fortunes to the same winds of extreme whimsy that have lifted the boats and market shares of Anti-Hero, Independent, Spitfire and Vans over the past half-decade. For better or worse, how many TWS or TSM logo shirts do you see outside the page that bears the subscriber postcards?
What does the ‘culture’ (if it can still so be called) lose without mags of record, available to impressionable groms as they wander their junior-high libraries and kill time while their parents peruse supermarkets? As the multinational footwear vacuums of Nike, Adidas and Converse briskly hoover up teamriders, should we similarly consider the vision of a future centered upon one or two print mags and a host of bootstrap-pulling, internet-based contenders? How have the dwindling number of skate magazine pages affected the photographer ranks, and will an honest living be makeable should the pendulum of publication shift squarely to the internet? How much do the board/shoe/etc companies themselves, nudging their teamriders toward cultivating flighty Instagram followings, bear responsibility for shifting eyeballs away from the printed page?
Though fetishized and taken to strange new places in recent years by Frenchmen, the powerslide, much like its close cousin in the mid-line revert so derided by Ricky Oyola, is at its best when spontaneously and sparingly sprinkled. The annals of history bear beloved black markings from marquee powerslides such as Rob Welsh’s backside skid down the SF hills in “Free Your Mind” and lengthier frontside ones rassled by Dennis Busenitz in “Roll Forever,” and whispered “what ifs” will forever trail Guy Mariano’s turnaround at LA High in “Mouse.” Busenitz more decisively combines the two for what will be one of the year’s better-remembered powerslide/revert type moves in this new Adidas Madrid clip, viewable around 5:48, shortly before a really cool step-down ledge trick. This clip is also notable for the most actual Mark Gonzales skate footage in one place in about several years and for deepening Mark Suciu’s typecasting as a perpetual video clip getter to whom varial heelflips come as easily as an ollie, or weed leaf emblems to mid-length socks.
On a related note, watch this space in the future for a half-baked ramble on how Adidas’ geographically oriented team clips are the new Transworld videos, dropping with the regularity of a semi-working clock with solid, if formulaic, production values, a similar devotion to indie rock staples and a steady supply of quality skating.
July 4 boasts more explosions and the month of August is typically reserved for the country of France to go on holiday, but Memorial Day weekend with its water-ski exhibitions and blazing barbecues is regarded as the true starting line for summertime and in some respects the peak, with its promise of near-limitless potential and hot grilling action. What follows below is one ill-conceived blog’s ready reckoner for who is going in this season.
Tom Remillard: In this era of all-terrain bros traversing hemispheres to gather footage Tom Taxpayer is a youthful voice for bootstraps restraint, filming the best section in this year’s Transworld vid mostly within the Washington St. skatebowls and including only a token sprinkling of handrailings and ledges. The specialist approach wrings new mileage out of ditch wallrides (ollie out, backside flare-slide) and the launch up to backside tailslide on the high wall advocates for gnarliest trick of 2012’s first half.
Jon Dickson: The day-glo orange cargo van of skating, Jon Dixon’s Deathwish video part delivered payment in full on a couple years’ worth of photos and sequences like the nollie backside flip the hard way over the rail, which looked like a textbook case for how somebody could ever hope to do such a trick. This section is the product of mutton chops, jangling keys and stretch denim and is saturated with clips to the extent that it’s hard to pull out the same stuff every time. Most recently it was the power b/s flip over the picnic table, the switch kickflip frontside noseslide and the half-cab heelflip hurdle-jump into the bank.
Kyle Walker: I remember Kyle Walker coming up as one of the scuzzy looking kids in the newer Real video who had some nice backside tailslide and smith grind pics go into the magazines, and this part he made for Volcom is as good a dump as any for his boatloads of towering fakie flips and tall-can backside 50-50s. Occasionally it looks like he puts a little too much ooph behind some kickflip or hardflip and they almost get away from him, upping the suspense, and there’s a real monster of a b/s tailslide down a rail and some good tricks on a spot I believe was formerly romanced by onetime TWS am issue cover-bro Neal Mims.
Austyn Gillette: Footloose, fancy free and sporting a newly gilded Ryan Gosling look, Austyn Gillette is jumping hubba ledges and capturing X-Game audiences’ hearts this summer apparently without the nettlesome strings of board or shoe sponsorship to cramp his style. The cocksure young man who skated to Juicy J and affronted several internet commentors by Babe-Ruth pointing in his “Cosmic Vomit 2” part, as is the custom, will take the summer months to play the field before settling down with new sponsors and filling his store-room full of canned goods, gunpowder and treated burlap so as to survive the long winter ahead.
Bonnier Corp: While skating is a lifestyle for some, drug overdose repellent for others and the key to unlocking the halls of eternal fame via Guinness World Records for a chosen few, for certain others it has served merely as a stopping-off point en route to bigger and better things, such as Hollywood acting careers or rap music moguldom. Count amongst the latter group now-former Transworld stewards Bonnier Corp., who ceremoniously announced last week that the firm had struck an arrangement to dump its action sporting titles in favor of no fewer than nine motorcycling magazines that will help fulfill a long-held thirst for “revenue growth and sustained profitability.” To the newly reborn Bonnier Motorcycling Group and its affiliated Boss Baggers, happy trails.
Forrest Edwards: Like the bad kid kicked out of school, Forrest Edwards is the creation of an industry that generally now seems not to know what to do with him, and for the time being has left him to his own devices, including but not limited to smoking, and curse words. Quartersnacks and Chief Keef put him/his worldview in better perspective than any of his post-OIAM spots have so far and the vulgar display of tech-gnar power here comes off like a double-dare to any would-be team manager types looking to try their hand at a career reboot. Is there a photo out there of the double-rail ollie?
Free Agency: Like nosesliding a handrail without a nollie or a kickflip attached, simply hopping to another company doesn’t cut it in 2013 when top-bench talent is breaking out for parts unknown with their best bros along for the ride. Though Deluxe is rumored to be one possible aviary for some of these newly free birds, other established manufacturers are on their heels and weighing responses. One rumored strategy has several top companies chipping in to buy the back covers of the Skateboard Mag, Thrasher and Transworld to run an all-text ad listing the names of heavy hitters under a banner that reads “five of these ten pros will be staying with their current sponsors rather than start a new company.”
The prospect of a full-length, sponsor-backed video section from Brazilian-pedigreed, New York-bred Yaje Popson has tantalized since he demonstrated board control and trick choices far outstripping his age in the Green Diamond video a few years ago, and given his quiet parting of ways with the Crailtap camp ahead of “Pretty Sweet” that wait seems destined to drag on. Two instances in 2012 served as stopover dumping grounds for footage of his frontside feeble grinds and switch backside lipslides, including one of the central pillars in JP Blair’s really awesome “Outdated” video that also delivered goods from Kevin Tierney, Brian Clarke and the pop-gifted, excitingly named Billy McFeely. Yaje Popson’s part reminds here of the mixtape-esque output of a post-“Mosaic” Danny Renaud, meaning sporadic and easy to miss if you aren’t out there looking for it, but super worthwhile. The switch b/s lipslide across the famed pyramid ledge is one of many highlights, along with a kinked-hubba backside tailslide and a perilous 50-50 transfer. We’ll see if any of the top-shelf tricks in his old Skateboarder interview make it into the planned “Dece Vid,” slated for a January release, and a reported migration to Brazil casts further uncertainty on his boarding future, but meanwhile the stuff from a separate ”Strange Notes” clip last summer is nearly as good as the “Outdated” part.
Quartersnacks the other day posted up this deep dive into Sect adherent Jake Johnson who sounds like he’s spent the better part of the last year pondering ponderous thoughts on a skate-oriented pilgrimage to Pittsburgh as part of a broader effort to reconnect with his inner dirtball. One of Jake Johnson’s ponders involves the “message” that underlies skateboarding, a potent smoothie of rebellion, aggression, creativity, pain and escapism, some of which might be lost on a generation coming up with parks aplenty and tweet-ready reality idols straddling the primetime viewing hour. There’s a separate message though for which Jake Johnson feels more personal responsibility, transmogrifying his board into a ball-point pen and the streets to an 8.5×11″ piece of white printer paper:
“My sponsors give me a lot of freedom. For the most part, they understand that me developing a concept, message, and my style of skating is the most important thing for their company. They’re willing to do whatever it takes for me to skate my best, and they trust me that I know how to do that. A lot of companies don’t.”
The comment (and whole interview really) signal that Jake Johnson found an early grasp on what somebody can do with the career opportunity he was handed, and seems to be thinking hard about what he wants to do with it. Who else thinks in terms of this “message” thing? I think Leo Valls and the “Night Prowler” guys definitely have an aesthetic that they’re looking to explore with their skating, built on what Ricky Oyola and Bob Puleo developed, a sorta homesteading purity for the streets. When Jamie Thomas cued up that clip of himself skating over that bridge in Chicago at the beginning of his “Welcome To Hell” section I think he had an idea he wanted to get across, same with Jim Greco and Stevie Williams a couple years later. Jason Dill is a dude who you can imagine looks at his message as a malleable and mutating thing. Mike Vallely’s career arc cast him into a spot now where you could say that “message” is a large portion of what he puts out.
There’s some comments made in the (too) long-gestating “Epicly Later’d” on Menace along the lines that Pupecki, Valdes, Suriel et al were at the time some assortment of castoffs and misfits corralled by Kareem Campbell to fill out his allotted corner of the Rocco empire. Maybe that’s partly true, but you gotta think that the mastermind behind our still-beloved “mNc” star logo had his own type of message in mind, having to do with communicating through vaguely scary hand-signals and 360 flipping through sidewalk cafes.
There’s any number of things that pretty much guarantee (eventually) a blog posting in this blog space, including but not limited to skateboarders throwing away lucrative sponsorship deals in favor of paying Don Cannon American dollars to shout slogans on a 75-minute mixtape, switch backside noseblunt slides, and various situations involving Fred Gall, moving vehicles and open containers. Another has been Jake Johnson skate footage, even recycled, it shines like a diamond-studded DVS logo pendant: the imitable Quartersnacks has fused a couple youtube clips’ worth of 3-4 year old video, some of which I’d seen, some not — like the couple runs near the end of the second clip incorporating some 180s up and down a median curb that zoomed me back to the one all those Zoo York/World guys used to skate with the turned-over trash can (or not, as the case may have been). That and the kickflip f/s tailslide in the first clip. Quartersnacks claims to be sitting on a long-form interview with Jake Johnson which will be worth reading. He seems to have come up with a healthy baked-in sense of disillusionment which tends to complement East Coast skating, and his off-the-grid movements are refreshing paired up against Twitter shouting matches between kids and pros closing in on 40. Pulling for the rumored Alien promo with Gilbert Crockett or at least some Gravis one-off to come next year, which will go some way towards offsetting the European sovereign debt crisis and the bad feelings that will come should AT&T Mobility lure away all of Boost Mobile’s best riders.
boil the ocean 
